When I'm working in Asana, I spend about 80% of my time on a page that most people don't even know exists. The My Tasks page. It shows all of your assigned work — tasks, subtasks, approvals and milestones — in one place.
But for a lot of people, it quickly turns into an unstructured list that feels harder to manage than helpful. Tasks pile up in Recently assigned, nothing gets sorted, and you don't know where to start.
This post fixes that. By the end, your My Tasks will be your personal command centre for managing your work.
What the My Tasks page is for
My Tasks shows everything with your name on it, whether that's a parent task, a subtask you assigned yourself, a milestone or an approval. The benefit is you don't have to go clicking and searching for your work through all of your projects.
It should be the first page you open every morning. What's been recently assigned to me? What am I working on today? What's coming up in the next week or so?
Two mistakes to avoid
The first mistake we see clients make is creating a separate project for themselves, something like “Paul's Tasks”, to plan to-dos and set reminders. You don't need a separate project. My Tasks already does this, and you can even create private tasks directly on the page. Anything you add there without a project is visible only to you, so it doubles as a private planning space.
The second mistake is neglecting the page entirely. People don't know how they're supposed to sort their tasks, so everything sits in one long list in Recently assigned. Unstructured, unorganised, no idea where to start.
Start with the default sections
When you sign up or get invited into Asana, you get four default sections: Recently assigned, Do today, Do next week and Do later.
You can create your own additional sections. I've worked with clients who had a section for tasks they're waiting on, or tasks they're thinking about. But when you're getting started, keep it simple. Start with the defaults.
That's essentially how I have mine organised: Recently assigned, Today, Upcoming and Later. The names are just terminology from when I signed up to Asana in 2012, and I've kept them. The logic is the same:
Recently assigned is what's just come in, tasks you need to look at and triage. Today is what you focus on. Upcoming is the next week or so. Later is everything more than a week away. Not urgent, put it off and come back to it.
The bulk of my tasks sit in Later and I never even open that section. I usually keep Upcoming closed too. I stay focused on what's due today.
Triage everything that lands in Recently assigned
When tasks arrive in Recently assigned, your first job is to triage them. What you must not do is leave them there. That's what results in the big unorganised list.
Remember, a task here is either one you created for yourself or, very often, one somebody else assigned to you. Often the first time you see it is when it arrives. So open it. Read the description and the comments. Make sense of it. Do you understand what needs to be done? Does the due date look accurate? If not, go back to the person who assigned it via the comments and clarify.
Once you understand the task, sort it into Today, Upcoming or Later. I do that from the dropdown menu on the task. Due Monday, within a week? Upcoming. Due three weeks out? Later.
Clearing out Recently assigned is a habit, a process I do every single day. Because I'm spending so much time on this page anyway, I look at tasks as they arrive, triage them and sort them.
Set up two rules to move tasks automatically
Once tasks are sorted, you need a way for them to automatically get promoted into Today when it's time to work on them. That's done with rules, set up in the Customize menu.
If you're going to adopt my method, these are the two rules you need:
Rule 1: If a start date is approaching (task is starting today) or a due date is approaching (task is due today), move it to the Today section.
Asana has a “due date is approaching” rule template you can use. Two things to watch: the template only includes the due-date trigger, so add the start-date trigger as well. If a task starts today and is due Friday, you still want it appearing in Today. And the template defaults to moving tasks to Recently assigned, so change the action to your Today section.
Rule 2: If the start date or due date is one week before, move it to the Upcoming section. Same as the first rule, except it lands in Upcoming.
Why your rule “isn't working”
A quick point on these date-approaching triggers: they run at midnight. When the date rolls over, Asana looks at every task that's due or starting today, or due or starting in one week, and moves them automatically.
Some people set up the rule, change a task's date to today, and wonder why nothing happens. It will, at midnight tonight. That's just how the rules work.
With both rules in place, I open Asana every morning, go straight to My Tasks, and overnight everything has been moved for me. I can see what's starting or due today, and what's coming up in the next week.
Watch out for tasks with no due date
If you get assigned a task without a due date and you sort it into Upcoming or Later, it's going to stay there. There's no date, so the rules can't run.
How I handle it: if I get a task without a date, I'll often just assign a date myself, even when there's no hard deadline. I use the date as a way of setting my intention: when do I want this to appear in my Today section so I can think about it? Put it for Friday, sort it into Upcoming, and on Friday I can review it and bump it back to Later if I need to.
Other ways to view your tasks
If you're not a list person, there are other ways to visualise your tasks.
The board view turns your sections into columns, with tasks as cards you can drag and drop. The calendar view is nice for seeing your week at a glance, or an entire month, and you can drag and drop to plan your week.
Within any view you can apply filters and sorting. My calendar was busy because it showed completed tasks, so I filtered to incomplete only. You can also add tabs along the top to view your work in different ways. For example, I duplicated my list view, filtered to incomplete tasks, grouped by project instead of section, added a condition for due dates in the next 14 days, and renamed the tab “Tasks by project”. Now I can switch between my time-sensitive view, board, calendar and tasks by project.
There's also a notepad tab. I use it as my quick scratchpad, somewhere to dump bits of text if I need to write something down or remember something for later.
On the right-hand side you'll find options to show additional columns: when the task was created or modified, visibility, attachments, and whether it's blocking or blocked by anything. That last one is quite a good one. And under the Customize menu you can create custom fields, say for priority. If you're new to custom fields, we did a video a little while ago on getting started with fields.
Pro tip: forward emails into My Tasks
If you really want My Tasks to be your command centre for everything, sometimes the work arrives as email. Warwick sent me an invoice that needs to be paid. He knows to give me a task, but he emailed instead.
You can add tasks via email by forwarding them to x@mail.asana.com . As long as you forward from the email address associated with your Asana account, it goes straight to your My Tasks.
The subject line becomes the task name, so rename it to something actionable like “Pay invoice”. Any text in the body becomes the description, and attachments come through into the task. It takes a minute to go through, then appears in Recently assigned. From there I put a date on it and sort it into Upcoming, same as any other task.
The payoff
When you organise My Tasks with a few simple sections and a couple of rules, it makes organising your tasks quick and easy. And that's when you unlock real productivity gains: you minimise the time in between work. You complete one task, go back to My Tasks, and see the next thing you need to do.
Want to see it all in action? Watch the full video walkthrough. And if you'd like live, interactive Asana training customised for your team, get in touch about our Asana consulting options.
FAQ
What is the My Tasks page in Asana? It's the page that shows all work assigned to you across every project, including tasks, subtasks, approvals and milestones, so you don't have to search through projects to find your work.
Do I need a separate project for my personal to-dos? No. My Tasks already collects everything with your name on it, and tasks you create directly there are private to you, so it works as a personal planning space.
Why isn't my “due date is approaching” rule moving tasks? These rules run at midnight. When the date rolls over, Asana checks every task due or starting today (or in one week) and moves them then, not the moment you change a date.
What happens to tasks without a due date? Rules can't move them, so they stay in whatever section you put them. Assign a date yourself, even without a hard deadline, as a reminder of when you want to review the task.
How do I turn an email into an Asana task? Forward it to x@mail.asana.com from the email address on your Asana account. The subject becomes the task name, the body becomes the description, and attachments are included.
If you’d like help setting up Asana, you can book an introductory call here: https://minorco.com/asana-consulting/